In conjunction with the development of Freikörperkultur of the time and the foundation of such organizations as the Verein für Körperkultur in 1901, dance in the form of bodily exercise constituted a main part of the larger counter-cultural movement of "Erneuerung des Menschen an Leib und Seele." (Gabriele Klein, FrauenKörperTanz , Berlin, 1992, 140).

Thus modern dance appealed to the lay people as a form of recreational exercise. The This participatory aspect of Ausdruckstanz crystallized in the development of group dances. For Laban "chorischer Tanz" was an expression of "gemeinschaftlichen Bewegungsimpulses." (Ferdinand.Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979).

Parallel to the development of group dance in Ausdruckstanz, festival productions were al ready a major part of the theater reform at the beginning of the 20th century, in reaction against the bourgeois theater with its strict separation between the andience and the performers. For example, in Hellerau, where Wigman was training under Dalcroze, innovative use of theater space and staging of large-scale group choreographies were already in practice. The institute that was built by Heinrich Tessenow functioned both as a school and as a "Festspielhaus". In July 1912, Dalcroze, together with theater refonner Adolphe Appia and the painter Alexander von Salzmann, who worked on the stage lighting of the large hall, staged Gluck's opera "Orpheus and Eurydice". It was such an aesthetic innovation that it became an international event where many renown artists and intellectuals, such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sergei Diaghilew, Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pawlowa, G. B. Shaw, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Max Reinhardt, gathered.The Festspielhaus, did not have anything that separated the stage from the audience; it was one large, rectangular room with the accommodation capacity of about 300 people. It did not have any separation between the podium, the stage and the audience seal There was no proscenium archor raised stage or an orchestra pit either. Also for the stage setting, they avoided decorative effect and used movable steps to create different kinds of settings and objects, such as the stairs to the underground for Orpheus. The walls and the ceiling were covered with white, transparent cloths, creating a unique lighting that was hannonious with the atmosphere of the music. As Salzmann commented: "instead of a lighted space, we have a light-producing space" (Yvonne Hardt, Politische Körper: Ausdruckstanz, Choreographien des Protests und die Arbeiterkulturbewegung in der Weimarer Republik, LIT Verlag, 2004).

By 1930, Wigman, who, in previous years, was vehemently arguing for the individualism of Ausdruckstanz, choreographed Totenmal, consisting of a "speaking" choir and a "movement" choir (a separation previously common to R.Steiner's Eurythmy, German: "Eurythmie"). This kind of Sprechchor was also popularly employed in the proletarian mass theater - both communist and socialist – in the Weimar Republic that allowed the participation of lay people and "represent a collective voice for the proletariat." (Timothy Kevin Donahue-Bombosch, Building the Nation: Fascist Mass Spectacle as Worker Culture. Dissertation, Stanford University, 1997).

According to Wigman, Tanzorchester was different from an Instrumentalorchester in music because each dancer could participate in producing the  work with his-her own "Stimme." Originally, "speaking choirs" were adopted by the Socialists as an effective form of mass culture that could also function as an aesthetic medium of political expression for workers. Speaking choir was important not only for its use on theater stages but also for the possibility to physically experience the utopian ideal of Gemeinschaft that was the political basis for the workers' solidarity. In fact, speaking choir, together with other Festspiele, Arbeiterfeiern and Turnfeiern that were often organized by SPD, was one of the few forms of practices that was rooted in the workers' movement and developed into a legitimate genre of "performance." In this sense the above where  not a ‘fascist’ aesthetic but its lack of clear message. The reviewer for the  Völkischer Beobachter, an organ of the Nazi party, interpreted the production as a straightforward support for pacifism.(See also Peter Gay. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, New York, 2001).

By the end of the 1920’s the Weimar Republic was close to its breakdown. The German economy, which was already extremely shaky with the exponentially growing unemployment rate, came to a complete breakdown following the Wall Street stock market crash and global Great Depression. Politically, 1930 then was marked by demagogy and violence culminating in the September election where the Nazis won their first big victory. Formally, the aesthetic of group dance that Laban developed as part of modern dance was not specifically confined to worker' s movement or to the National Socialist' s body politics, but it responded to all of them.

Though Wigman might have been successful enough to be able to be commissioned for the next year's Olympic opening ceremony, it was also to be her last dance commissioned by the Nazis. The  ambiguity of the meaning of "successful compromise" is equally represented in the case of Laban. He was commissioned to choreograph a "dedicatory act" entitled Vom Tauwind und der neuen Freude for the opening of the Dietrich   Eckart-Theater on the night of the Olympic opening ceremony. A sketch of the  choreography had been presented and approved by the Propaganda Ministry in 1935 as a "masterpiece" due to the inclusion of "German movement choirs and dance  choruses from aIl the districts of the Reich". However, things suddenly changed in June 1936 after Goebbels attended its rehearsal, who wrote in his diary on 21 June,  1936, that the dance was "too intellectual" (Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, Marion. Hitler's Dancers. German Modern Dance and the Third Reich Trans. by Jonathan Steinberg, New York, 1996).

By June 1937, Goebbels gave a clear definition of "good" dance: "Dance must be cheerful and show beautiful female bodies. It has nothing to do with philosophy."

In February 1938, Laban left Germany and settled in England where he spent the rest of his life teaching dance. Wigman performed only solo dances in private until the  WWII was over. But at least one student of Mary Wigman’s style Martha Graham; became famous in the USA, and initially also  used   group dances reminiscent of corps de ballet, which originally has the function of  replacing the chorus in an opera, takes over the center piece of the performance. In  fact, with the development of modem group dances, the movement dynamic within the group becomes the material of the dance performance itself.

Most  successful under the Nazi’s became Leni Riefenstahl, who in "Filmtanz" an early precursor dance in film. Before Riefenstahl made her films under the Nazi regime, she was an actress in Arnold Fanck's mountain films, popular during the twenties and early thirties.

Throughout her career, Mary Wigman insisted that her choreographies differed from other popular forms of body culture, such as rhythmic gymnastics, which she considered to be mere 'dilettantism' expressionist-modernism was the only dance that qualified as true art. Because it had a social agenda; it would show mankind to a better future. It is interesting to compare Wigman's to another critic of in this case rhythmic gymnastics, Siegfried Kracauer, who, in "The Mass Ornament", criticizes it precisely for the opposite reason: for not being 'superficial' enough. The debate over the cultural value of dance and choreography more generally an be summarized by comparing the two opposing positions: whereas Wigman snubs rhythmic gymnastics and dismisses it for its lack of aesthetic value, Kracauer praises it-precisely for its overt entertainment value. It is interesting to consider that Kracauer would have seen the modern dancers of his time (who were all more or less part of the culture of rhythmic gymnastics) as being hopeless victims of modernity. The dancers thought of themselves as being at the forefront of the time, 'practicing' social criticism. Mary Wigman certainly did not intend it with any sense of irony when she talked about how dance, as 'life', was the aesthetic medium for the humanity of the future. In fact, as we have seen, Wigman's desire to secure her status as a "modemist" led her to constantly overload her dance with meanings until it became a pseudo-religion for Wigman. (See Terri J. Gordon, Fascism and the Female Form: Performance Art in the Third Reich Journal of the History of Sexuality - Volume 11, Number 1 and 2, January/April 2002, pp. 164-200).

For Kracauer then, it was the very 'seriousness' of the dancers that seemed to undermine their art. If only they could be 'light' about it and treat it for what it was rhythmic motion, social entertainment, health practice etc. - then what would have  seemed like cultural 'crudeness' would have inversely functioned as their cultural  criticism. However modem dance does not fit into the conventional understanding of "modemism" as a pure aesthetic category. Modem dance developed in response to the social ideal to develop a new lifestyle, a new form of life, in reaction to what was perceived to be a overly mechanized modem society. It developed as a response to concrete social problems, such as modem physical ailments, deficiencies in education system and problems of worker's health. Thus, it had a clear social agenda and 'content' from the beginning and its goal was to revive dynamic human relationships by teaching people how to "naturally" express themselves through their bodies. If this was indeed the case, then we would need to revise our categories of modemism. Instead of considering it as an 'inferior' and 'frivolous’offshoot of the traditional hierarchy of the arts, it should be placed at the center of it, as an attempt to change the very structure of society (idem Fascism and the Female Form).

After all, dance inspired and worked with every aesthetic innovation in modernity, from film and literature to painting and theater. Theater producers were working together with modem dancers, artists were painting dancers at work, writers were visiting dance performances and film directors were borrowing the discourse of dance to explain their new medium. Seen in this light, it does not do justice to see modemism as a monolithic category for one sphere of culture. In fact ‘modernism’should be understood more generally as an aesthetic innovation that aimed to improve society by achieving a new lifestyle. In the case  of ‘modernity’ however as we will se next in the case of Mary Wigman, there also seems to be then something about art that moves doser to 'politics' and something about politics that relies on 'art'.

For updates click homepage here